Prologue

October, 945 SE – Siklantel, Halinen Confederacy

Telenu laid on the roof of his manor, pen motionless in one hand, bottle of wine half empty in the other. The points of his long iltsuen ears took on a rosy tint as the night’s chill set in. A stack of letters were splayed out on the slate tiles and illuminated by a single wavering candle, one light in a glowing web that stretched over the city of Siklantel.

He was a noble near the center of that web, far from the perimeter walls, the rolling hills, and the vast Lake Gita’ange beyond that blended into the dark shell of night pressing inwards on the city. Yet, he might have as well been in the middle of the lake, as far from Siklantel’s politics as a fisherman or dock slave. Decisions in the city were made over dinner parties, hunting parties, music parties, and wedding parties, none of which he was ever invited to. Positions in the bureaucracy were given out to some cousin of a noble’s second wife. A web was built on connections after all, and an unmarried iltsuen like him with no living close relatives was like a stray strand of silk that could be blown away by a gust of wind at any moment, a part of the web in name only.

This was partially his own doing. His manor’s walls were covered in brown vines, and the stagnant water in his fountain had become a mosquito’s paradise. It had been years since he got a haircut or trimmed his beard, though he always made sure to keep clean. He had long substituted his routine of a dab of rogue on the cheek for the red flush of wine, and chewing mint herbs that freshened up the breath with more wine.

When Telenu’s candle finally flickered out, he pushed himself up. A wave of tension cascaded from his neck down to his legs as his muscles moved for the first time in hours. Spots of light danced across his eyelids as they adjusted to the darkness. A gust of wind picked up a few pages of the letters, most of them still blank, and scattered them onto the courtyard below. Telenu raised his bottle to drain it before kicking the remaining pages off the roof.

“Pieces of shit,” he cussed. “Can’t even find the time to respond once in five fucking years.”

The paper floated down and coated the fountain like leaves, their ripples only made visible by how the stars moved on the water. A fleeting shadow blotted out their dance accompanied by footsteps on the cobble walkway leading to the manor. Telenu’s ears twitched at the noise. He held the bottle to his eye like a periscope and saw a short, cloaked figure whose head bobbed in and out of the remaining drops of wine.

Telenu raised the bottle one last time for its precious contents, but forgot to move it over his mouth. Acidity pierced his right eye, causing him to flail and stumble around the roof. His foot caught a stray piece of paper at the roof’s ledge which sent him tumbling into a free fall.

“An iltsuen noble falls 10 meters to his death. What is the speed he accelerates to when his body is plastered over cobblestones?”

For Telenu, finding the answer to such a simple question was automatic even in his stupor: approximately 14 meters per second. With only two meters left before the thought experiment became empirical, he decided he needed to accelerate himself upwards at around 40 meters per second, or apply five times the force with which gravity was currently pulling him to his demise. With both the intent of self preservation and the necessary calculations fulfilled, aermit took its effect. Telenu felt a sudden pull upwards that arrested his fall to something comparable to tumbling down the stairs and he collapsed in a pile at the foot of the fountain. Physics was only a drunken approximation to nature after all.

A pair of boots stopped in front of him. “Are you Sir Telenu Dakway?” a young woman’s voice asked. It had a sternness he would never associate with such a light tenor.

His stomach greeted his guest before he did, darkening the bottom of her cloak. “Yes,” he coughed out, after his mouth was sufficiently clear of bile. “Who’s asking?”

“I am Neri, secretary to the eimeltet of Siklantel, Afrayn Siklan.”

The name of the one who held the web together caused a wave of sobriety to wash over Telenu, though perhaps it was really due to the wine leaving his body. What could the eimeltet possibly want with someone like him?

“You’re probably wondering what business my lady has with you.” Neri took a few steps back and gave her leg a good kick, but her cloak was already soaked through. “To be honest, I don’t know. I am simply here to deliver a message.” She took a small metal cylinder from her pocket and placed it in front of Telenu. It was a preektil; the letter within was written on a long strip and rolled up, protected from the elements by its metallic shell.

Telenu took the preektil and the secretary turned to leave. “Wait, please let me handle your cloak and serve you something to drink before you leave.”

Neri stopped and looked down at her legs again. “Make it quick.”

Most rooms in the manor were coated in a thick layer of dust. The exceptions were the pantry, the lavatory, the kitchen, and the study which was furnished with a small cot. Near the entrance, Telenu grabbed a candle stick and snapped his fingers.

“What pressure must a region of air be compressed to before it reaches a temperature of 250 degrees centigrade?”

Modern science did not yet have the tools to find an accurate answer to such a problem, but aermit only required base principles and estimations. Telenu knew that compressing air fast would increase its temperature, and through months of trial and error found that a pressure of around 8 times the normal atmosphere was enough to ignite a candle wick dipped in whale oil.

From Neri’s perspective, this all happened nearly instantaneously. A small look of surprise briefly flashed on her face, just in time for the candle’s light to reach her and for Telenu to catch it. He could now see that she was a populous human, the type with rounded ears and only a handful of decades of life. A thick red line marked the middle of her left cheek down to her jaw, a badge of the eimeltet’s office which under the cloak of night had blended smoothly into her tan skin.

“This is where you receive guests?” Neri asked with neither judgement nor humor when they arrived at the kitchen.

“I haven’t had a guest in years.” He retrieved two cloudy glasses which he wiped with his shirt before pouring some wine. Then, he hoisted a large wooden basin of water onto the counter top. “Anyone would be hard pressed to provide good hospitality at this hour.”

Neri did not touch the wine set in front of her, but did not protest when Telenu helped her remove her cloak. “The eimeltet ordered me to come at this hour as to not attract attention from the other iltsuen nobles.”

The mention of his neighbors put Telenu back in a dismal mood, so he took a big gulp of wine before beginning to wash the cloak. With a finite amount of inheritance remaining from his parents, he had fired his servants and learned to do his own laundry along with various other household chores, but doing it in front of a commoner felt somewhat humiliating. He supposed this was the price to pay if he wanted enough wine to last him the rest of his life.

“What you did earlier, when you fell from the roof and lit the candles, was quite impressive.” Neri graciously offered a convenient topic of discussion to ease the awkwardness.

“Just some party tricks I learned while studying abroad.”

“The eimeltet mentioned you crossed the sea many decades ago and only returned when your parents passed.”

“Smallpox,” he replied without looking up.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Yes, coming back to Siklantel was indeed a loss.” Telenu set down his task for another sip. “In Baernvar I had teachers, peers, people who valued my skills and opinions, but it seems I was mistaken. I didn’t know our friendship was so one sided that to respond to my letters was such a grueling task.”

“I would imagine losing letters on the long voyage is common.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“Are aermit and the other sciences not a popular topic of discussion among the iltsuen nobles here in Siklantel? Lady Siklan seems to enjoy it.”

“They value dogma,” he grumbled. A whirlpool of bitter memories stirred within Telenu as he recalled the contempt his ideas were treated with when he tried to present them to academics in Siklantel. “So stuck in their nostalgia for a non-existant iltsuen empire and the glory of their victory over you populous humans that they cannot tell that the world has moved on.”

“Then perhaps you could have published independently.”

Telenu snorted. “Without peers, a scholar is nothing. We can’t navigate the complex maze of natural laws created by the gods alone. And I may as well be alone in Siklantel.”

“You are iltsuen. You still have many decades of youth, and many more decades of life after that. With that kind of time, you could educate an entire generation of populous humans to be your peers.”

A wry smile crept onto Telenu’s lips. “You populous humans think time to be more powerful than it is. How old are you?” Neri didn’t answer, so he took it upon himself to estimate based on her unblemished skin and the way she carried herself as someone trying to be taken seriously. “Twenty? Twenty five? You’ve lived half my lifetime and already you’re the closest person to the eimeltet in all of Siklantel. Let me guess, your grandfather betrayed his tribe to fight with the iltsuens and your family has been living off of iltsuen coin ever since.”

When he picked up his glass again, it slipped from his hands into the basin dying the water and the cloak an inky purple once more. After a long stretch of silence, Neri spoke. “I once sold myself on the streets, in places where pointed ears are an invitation to rob a man and beat him until he is reminded he too is mortal. Do you think Lady Siklan took me in out of kindness?”

“*Maybe you have a special talent. I heard the eimeltet hasn’t married yet. Does she like it that way?” He couldn’t look at her, instead choosing to loose himself in the swirling wash-water as if it was a portal that could transport him far from the conversation and himself.

He heard Neri stand up and leave. “I think the eimeltet will have a use for you after all,” she said calmly.

When she had left the kitchen, he finally looked up at the empty chair. “Cheers.” He reached across the table for her untouched glass and tipped it back as the door to the manor opened and closed.

Telenu slumped back in a chair, eyes fluttering just as the sky began to take on an indigo hue. Before succumbing to sleep, he managed to pull the preektil Neri delivered from his pocket and unravel the message within. “The eimeltet, Afrayn Siklan, invites Sir Telenu Dakway to join her on a hunt at her manor at dawn on the 18th of September.”

Telenu arrived at the eimeltet’s manor before the sun had fully risen, its glow over the horizon turning the sky various shades of purple and pink. He had picked out his best cloak, a dark piece lined with silver threads, and polished his musket’s metal until he could see his own reflection in it. His scraggly beard was trimmed down to an uneven stubble, and returned to his cheek rogue and chewing mints for the first time in many years.

The eimeltet’s manor was noticeably distinct from the traditional iltsuen style. It was wide rather than long, with a cube-like central body and two wings that extended to either side. In place of large wooden panels and sloping tiled roofs, it was held up by limestone bricks and had a wide windows with flat roof. It was a style Telenu was familiar with, the style of Baernvar.

Neri was already waiting in the courtyard. With the morning light and a sober mind, Telenu finally saw the frail girl whose tired and surrendered gaze he had mistaken for composure under candlelight.

“Good morning Sir Dakway.” She gave him a curt nod, but said nothing of their previous conversation.

“Ah- Good… morning,” he managed, but the apology he wanted to give caught in his throat. Instead, he returned her cloak, washed and ironed.

He was led to the back of the manor where the eimeltet was leaning on a low stone wall. Her brown cloak had patterns of regal red, the same red that colored the makeup eminating from her eyes down her cheeks like rays of the sun. Her long ears folded to the side as she squinted against the dawn at the two approaching figures. Telenu’s chest tightened.

“My lady.” He bowed, causing his musket’s strap to almost slip off his shoulder before he caught it. “Is it just the two of us?”

“Yes, I’ve been looking forward to this,” she answered. “Let’s hunt.”

An iltsuen hunt was more of a leisurely walk through the eimeltet’s private forest, on horseback. It was silent save for the chirping of early morning birds and the thudding of horse hooves. Telenu spent the time watching her cloak sway back and forth in the wind, unsure if he even wanted to start a conversation. Instead, he let the serene calm of the morning seep between them, filling any sense of awkwardness with the rustling of leaves and the scent of dew-soaked soil. He trusted the eimeltet would bring up whatever business she had with him sooner or later.

A branch snapped and the eimeltet stopped. She raised her musket and cocked it, each movement slow and practiced. Her finger found its way past golden inlays to a steel trigger. Her ears rotated back and her eyes narrowed, causing her makeup to stretch and bend. Telenu followed the her gaze down the barrel, into the treeline, to a deer. Then, a woosh, a crack, and a thud.

She clasped her hands in a brief prayer to the Great Spirit who lived in all things. When Telenu did not follow suit, the eimeltet raised an eyebrow. Their eyes met and he could no longer escape the questioning.

“Forgive me, my Lady. I am a Caudar.” The religion from across the sea still garnered suspicion from the people of Siklantel.

“Ah yes, Neri told me you spent your time overseas studying in Baernvar.” It seemed she was simply curious. The eimeltet threw a flag into the path to mark the location of the deer before urging her horse down the path. “Are you a Magisterian Caudar or a Reformist Caudar?”

“King Otto II had long purged his lands of Magisterians by the time I arrived, so naturally my priests were Reformists. However, I am a man of science and reason. It seems rather silly to me to be so strict about such things.”

“I understand the king’s reasoning.” She shook her head. “If your subject is a Magisterian and you are a Reformist, can you be certain of their loyalty? At the same time, if the Supreme Pontiff of the Magisterians does not lead God’s kingdom on Earth, then who is the Emperor he crowns and what legitimacy does that Emperor’s decrees have before a powerful king like Otto?”

“I… never considered that.”

The two soon reached the top of a hill overlooking the whole of Siklantel. On the west side, the wings of the eimeltet’s new palace were beginning to take shape. Its white stone walls and piercing central spire stood in stark contrast to the swathes of dark wood and adobe houses across the city. A gentle breeze came from Lake Gita’ange beyond the palace, its pale blue dominating the western horizon. Telenu breathed in the morning air.

“What gives my reign legitimacy?” the eimeltet asked. “Why do the citizens of Siklantel follow my decrees?”

Telenu thought about the question carefully, unsure of whether or not this was a test. Strictly speaking, the role of the eimeltet was different from a queen; it was akin to the assigned overseer of the iltsuen army rather than a monarch. So instead of considering what divine or legal authority she had, he considered why he himself held her in such high regard. “Because your family is the center of the iltsuen web of marriages that binds our people together.” Any iltsuen who wanted to participate in governance understood this and therefore tried to expand their marriages as far as possible. Gender, love, and monogamy were secondary concerns compared to having a family member close to the eimeltet.

The eimeltet gave no indication as to whether she liked this answer. “What of the populous humans then? Only one in ten people in Siklantel are iltsuen, one in a hundred in the Halinen Confederacy, and one in a thousand in the world.”

This was an easier question. “Because you have an army.” Telenu shielded his eyes against the sun to see the wall of the city and the cannons mounted on their bastions. They were relics from a time that the populous human children of Siklantel only knew in stories from their grandparents and a time Telenu’s iltsuen generation had experienced as children.

“Precisely.” She smiled. It was surprisingly gentle, like that of his teachers in Baernvar. “Our system of marriages cannot grant us legitimacy with the populous humans. Ever since our grandfathers’ generation fled from out homelands and our fathers’ generation claimed this new homeland, we have lacked the tools to coexist with populous humans under one government. Even our faith in the Great Spirit is a feeble attempt to ease this integration.”

Telenu turned to see that the eimeltet’s smile had grown into a wide grin. She was not a queen, but Telenu was reminded of the portraits of King Otto II of Baernvar and King Philip I of Virdia. Afrayn Siklan looked upon Siklantel if the city below was undoubtedly hers alone as it’s name implied.

He furrowed his brow as he tried to parse her intent. “My lady, do you… wish for me to convert you to Reformist Caudarism?”

A roaring laugh as bright as the sunlight at her back erupted from the eimeltet. “I admire the Baernvar king, but I do not wish to become him. No, Siklantel needs its own institutions and I want you to help me build them.”

“I’m sorry my lady, I still don’t-”

“Marry me. Become my eimerteti.”

It took a moment for the weight of her command to register in his mind. Him, second to only her in all of Siklantel. He would have all the nobles who had written him off dancing in the palm of his hand. At the same time, there existed those who knew of the Baernvar king’s policies better than he did that were also from more reputable families in Siklantel. His question, and the question Neri must have had when she came to his manor, was simply: “Why me?”

The eimeltet steered her horse back down the hill, turning back briefly before she entered the treeline to answer his question. “The same reason I chose that whore to be my secretary.”